In 2005 vendors were ranked on the quality of the ETL tool. In 2006 it was expanded to evaluate on a much wider set of data integration criteria. As a result just about everybody on the quadrant dropped or moved sideways.

The Quadrant Performers

These are the vendors who didn't plunge in the latest ranking, the dark green dot shows the 2005 ETL position and the light green dot is the 2006 data integration position:

Informatica is happy with the high score for ability to execute, IBM is boastful about completeness of vision. The drop in Informatica's Completeness of Vision indicates there may still be gaps in the suite. They put together a $200 million acquisition war chest a couple years ago and purchased Striva for $62M (mainframe access), Similarity for $55M (data quality and profiling) and ItemText for $55M (unstructured and semi-structured data). That gives them at least $28M still to play with. I could see them picking up a modeling tool next for integrated source to target mapping to match IBM Rational Data Architect on the Information Server.

Business Objects, SAS and IWAY moved diagonally but are well positioned on a tough quadrant. SAP and TIBCO were not on the old ETL quadrant so they get marks for qualifying but are both hovering in no mans land.

The Quadrant Droppers

Now let's look at the vendors who had significant drops:

Three big plunges:

Oracle: from a leader to a niche. Ouch! "Oracle has not yet clearly articulated a cohesive positioning and strategy around its various data integration tools, and most Gartner customer interactions reflect the implementation of OWB for ETL use-cases only." Oracle has data integration functions spread across OWB, fusion, Siebel Analytics, Sunopsis. It will be interesting to see what they come up in Fusion to fix the gaps that gave them a poor score.

Embarcadero: "Lack of support for data delivery styles other than physical bulk data movement (ETL) and minimal capabilities for data quality operations represent areas of weakness."

Ab Initio: like ETI they dropped as they focus mainly on ETL and rely on partners for data quality and profiling. Ab Initio have always gone their own way (without telling anyone where they were going) and it looks like they are branching out into supporting transactional databases rather than following the herd into data integration suites.

Cognos Bringing up the Rear

Cognos ended up a long way behind Business Objects for completeness of vision, I am sure BOjbs sales staff will be hauling this quadrant out at every opportunity. I don't see this as such a bad thing.

Yesterday I came across an article in the NewYorker In Praise of Third Place that talks about how Nintendo benefited from being third in the game console war where Sony made a small profit, Microsoft XBox lost money and Nintendo made a billion dollars profit across all divisions:

Nintendo's success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?)

Cognos is in a similar situation in data integration. Why spend tens of millions of dollars filling out the suite only to get beaten up by IBM and Informatica with a better suite or beaten up by Microsoft and Oracle with a cheaper suite? Cognos just needs to sell the data integration suite to Cognos customers to turn a profit. Why try to beat Business Objects in data integration when the real battle is the BI tools?

Exclusions

It is disappointing for Computer Associates to miss out on the quadrant given they own ErWin and Advantage Data Transformer.

The data federation vendors are now off the map in terms of Gartner evaluations. They do not have enough functionality to make it onto the Data Integration quadrant and they don't have an EII quadrant. BEA Systems, Ipedo and DataMirror miss out.

SyncSort is one of the few ETL vendors who have not expanded to other data integration capabilities. Will they be purchased in the next 12 months?

Data Federation Waiting to Exhale

A repeating trend in the report is that vendors who have added federation (or EII) products to an existing suite are not seeing much success in these products. Business Objects are having a lot of success with Data Integrator ETL but not much Data Federator sales. Informatica is not having much success with the PowerCenter Federation Option.

The Wrap

I want to end this post with a link to the Data Doghouse blog post I want to preface this post with a link to the Data Doghouse blog post The best-in-class may not be the best-for-you talks about alternatives to the expensive suites of the market leaders and reminds us that quadrant position alone should not drive decision making:

I think the BI and DI suites are terrific but has the best-in-class been made into the best-for-some? Certainly many in the Fortune 500 can afford the software licenses, implementation costs and associated hardware investments but how about everyone else, such as the SMB (small to medium size market) or even many groups or projects in the large companies?

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

Vincent McBurney is an IBM Information Champion for Information Integration.

Popular White Paper On This Topic

Related White Papers

6 Comments

Vincent,
Enjoyed your analysis. In particular, your two quadrant charts illustrating shifts sideways and down was terrific. I don't think Gartner analysts could be as frank (too politically correct) as you in your assessment of their rankings.
I am going to post my review in the context of "The Wrap" you finished your post. As a long-time software person & data architect, I am totally into the data integration suite concept. That's my engineering undergraduate degree and CS graduate studies speaking. My business side, influenced by alot of people I talk to in both Fortune 500 and SMB (small to medium business) enterprises, feels that not everyone wants nor needs (nor can afford resource or costs) those data integration suites.
Thanks for your insight,
Rick
As a disclaimer, I think Ascential (I mean IBM) and Informatica are great products. I have been involved in many Informatica implementations starting with my days at PwC Consulting and am currently a co-chair of a regional Informatica Users Group. I live twenty minutes from Ascential headquarters, have written a "Redbook" for them and have clients using their suite. Besides these products I have clients who have used (and sometimes I have helped with) Sunopsis (now Oracle), Business Objects, Oracle, Microsoft, Cognos, ETI, and a few others.

Good to hear from you Rick. This is the blog for people who like data integration suites! If you write anything about DI online drop me a message to websphereblog at gmail dot com.
So far Informatica, SAS, Pervasive and Business Objects have all delivered press releases about being in the Challenger, Leader or Visionary quadrant. I've yet to see anything from IBM other than in blogs. This has resulted in IBM missing out on a lot of free publicity, I am seeing three or four articles in various online magazines reporting on the Informatica press release.
The quadrant was hard to find (I didn't hear about it until it had been out for a week) and harder to read (if you didn't want to pay for it you had to wait for Informatica to post it) so most of the publicity on the quadrant is coming from vendor press releases and not from anyone who has read the report! This makes it essential to get a press release out early as a lot of news sites work off RSS feeds from vendors.
So here are the announcements and press releases on the quadrant so far:
Business Objects announcement: "In 2006, Business Objects has grown license revenues from these products to more than $31 million for the first three quarters, an increase of nearly 60% over the same period in 2005."
SAS press release: "SAS has thousands of data integration customers, and we are rapidly becoming a recognized leader in the space by marketing and delivering our universal data integration solutions to a broader spectrum of users."
Pervasive press release: "We believe this recognition of our track record in delivering robust integration tools, especially to ISVs and SIs, validates our vision for agile, embeddable integration as a key enabler for our customers’ business success."
Informatica Press Release: "We will continue to execute on our vision and roadmap for enterprise data integration, including helping customers capitalize on the benefits of software-as-a-service and making data quality assurance an integral, embedded component in business processes."
Still no press release from IBM though they have posted the full report to the data management library even though it belongs in the Websphere library where the quadrant tools sit.

The release of a new Magic Quadrant is always a joy, there's nothing better than comparing our toys. I thing they should be taken with a pinch of salt though, the Gartner in-house joke is that "Ability to execute" really stands for "How much do they pay us" and "Completeness of vision" translates into "To what extent they take our advice"...
Great post though and as you rightly point out, the right tool for the job doesn't have to be one of the leading tools. In fact, could being a Niche tool be just as good a sales pitch?

Hi Vince. Nice write-up. Just one point, you mention the following ...
"Still no press release from IBM though they have posted the full report to the data management library even though it belongs in the Websphere library where the quadrant tools sit."
The Information Server is actually part of the Information Management brand in IBM (used to be called the Data brand) and not the WebSphere brand. Unfortunately whoever names the products put the word "Websphere" at the beginning of the product names which has led to much confusion in the marketplace.
The best thing to do here is to ignore the word as it doesnt actually mean anything.

When IBM acquired Ascential all the new products were put into the WebSphere brand as this is where the middleware and business integration applications can be found. The DB2 Data Integrator was becoming less of a database tool and more of an enterprise information portal so it was also moved into WebSphere.
I think the Information Management software area is a superset of tools from across the other areas. While Lotus, Rational, Tivoli and WebSphere seem to be brand names Information Management is a mega group with software across all brands. Since the Information Server has products from multiple brands it sits in the Information Management group. This solves the problem of where to go for Information Server news and library items.

Interesting. Yet it depends upon what your data integration needs are... purely BI? Data warehousing? Data consolidation?
For data warehousing, we have found that WhereScape RED is a wonderfully adequate solution. Basically, it builds data warehouses and does it very quickly.
After spending months with big-end-of-town solutions we liked the agility and the ability that RED gives us to quickly prototype something and roll it out. It even documents everything automatically in HTML.
Has anyone else used this tool? I heard it recently won Microsoft's 'Front Runner' status - whatever that means.

Disclaimer: Blog contents express the viewpoints of their independent authors and
are not reviewed for correctness or accuracy by
Toolbox for IT. Any opinions, comments, solutions or other commentary
expressed by blog authors are not endorsed or recommended by
Toolbox for IT
or any vendor. If you feel a blog entry is inappropriate,
click here to notify
Toolbox for IT.

Vincent McBurney is an IBM Champion for Information Integration and has been blogging for many years on InfoSphere software and ...
more

Vincent McBurney is an IBM Champion for Information Integration and has been blogging for many years on InfoSphere software and competitors in Information Management, Governance, Data Integration and Data Warehousing.
less

Receive the latest blog posts:

Share Your Perspective

Share your professional knowledge and experience with peers. Start a blog on Toolbox for IT today!

Copyright 1998-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC (Toolbox.com). All rights reserved. All product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Toolbox.com is not
affiliated with or endorsed by any company listed at this site.